Empty and Filled, Empty and Filled, Empty and Filled

It’s Monday morning, and I have returned to the hallways of the high school where I teach English. I am walking in, as I always do, carrying a ceramic mug of coffee with my leather computer satchel hung over my shoulder. The bag was a gift from my wife. She is very concerned that I look good. It’s May, Cinco de Mayo. The sun is bright and the sky is blue. The humidity is low. It is 60 degrees already. The trees have dropped their petals and pollen. There are still some splotches of magenta in the understory, but the tips of trees are turning chartreuse, and the lawns, mown twice now, are a thickening carpet of kelly green. The wind is still.  The sparrows are singing as they flit behind the brown gutters of the yellow brick building where I work.

I have returned to Illinois after visiting Ohio over the weekend, where I had taken communion with a body of believers at Kent State. I was there for to read poems I had written and to listen to poems that others had written. They call it Jawbone. It’s a bone for speaking and chewing. It’s a human bone and an animal bone. It’s a bone that feeds us, and it’s a bone we use to feed each other. 

I did not know any of the people that I had driven 500 miles to share my life with. There is a man at the center of this community, a man in a wheel chair, a man who had been knocked down by polio at seven or eight years old. But he learned to walk without legs. He used his hands instead. He left my hometown before I was born to chase angels in Kent. He was there when the students died. I walked through through memory of the tragedy this weekend, May 4, the 44th anniversary of the shooting. Anniversary is horrible word for remembering death. 

Right now, my students are writing essays, so I have a little time to write this. I want to record what I experienced in Kent. But a student of mine just interrupted me. She asked to see the guidance counselor. She is fourteen and lives with her grandfather and his wife. I don’t know where her mother and father are. I don’t think she does, either. She tells me that she walked into a room this weekend and saw her grandfather’s girlfriend performing CPR on his dead body, and she wants to talk to someone about it. She tells me, matter of factly, that she thought that she could make it through the school day, but people are pissing her off already. It’s 8:30.

I went to Kent because I sensed that I was there already, and I wanted to meet myself, to find out who I am. I was right. I was there. I saw myself like I was looking in a mirror, and I learned that I am who I am. I learned to stop seeking the person I wanted to be. To instead, live within myself. Be here. Be present. 

On Saturday night in Kent, forty of us were reading our poems to each other in the back of a bookstore. The man whose legs won't work looked at me and told his family that I had driven 500 miles to share my poems, calling me the thousand-mile man. He asked if I had a final poem to read. I did, and I was ready to rad it. I had chosen this one:

Audience

This skin's stretched across these bones,

Like a canopy in the middle of wilderness,

Sheltering a stirring inside,

Where I dwell, god-like, till the curtain is drawn and folded,

And I am placed in a box to be carried to another place,

Set up and torn down.

Inhabited by generations, borne through deserts,

Wrinkled and creased, torn and repaired.

There is holiness inside, where I invite you to dwell,

To dine upon shewbread and take visitation with me.

I am within. Enter, you who are without,

We two will witness holiness.

You will I hear with intention, breathe into my lungs,

We will bear each other forever forward

Into the promised land.

But I didn’t read it. Instead, I asked if he had a request, which I knew was an unfair question. He had read some of my poems on the Internet a month or so ago, and he had given me some encouraging words about them. I wondered if he might have remembered one. I wanted to know what poems I had written that were still in his memory. He said he had no request, but he asked me to read a poem that would turn back the devil if he walked into the room where we were sharing life together, and I suddenly knew the poem that I wanted to read, which was not the one I had already chosen, and I had to shuffle through pages of printed poems that I had brought with me to read, but I couldn’t find it. Another poet offered to read one while I looked, and I was happy for the opportunity to search for it. But by the end of his recitation, I still had not found the poem to turn back the devil, so a young girl read another poem, probably about something beautiful, but I did not listen to it because I was still too busy searching for a stone to kill the devil with so that people would celebrate how brave a man I was. As her voice fell on my ears like background music, I saw, at last, the poem that I was searching for, and I read it bravely in the emptying room:

White Man

God knew better

Than to send the Messiah

Through your vas deferens.

In the belly of Madonna

The Savior grew strong

Without your help.

She was a better teacher,

Who never taught him

To speak with his fists.

Instead, he loved those

You paid to have sex with you

Before you stoned them.

He took nothing from them,

So they washed his feet

With perfume and with tears.

How their hearts must have ached

To see him in the Temple

Wrestling you.

How they must have known

The bruises he would carry

Defending them.

How they must have cried

As they prepared his body

For the grave.

White man, step aside.

White man, open your hands.

White man, put down your sticks and stones.

The Savior returns

Again and again

In every act of love.

The Resurrection continues

Day after day

In every act of kindness and of grace.

Christ has returned

As a thief in the night,

Without your noticing,

Imprisoned with the oppressed,

Suffering with orphans and with widows,

Building his kingdom quietly,

Without your help.

As I finished, people looked at me and smiled just as I had looked at them and smiled at the poems I, too, had tolerated, and I knew that I had not slayed the devil. He has been my best friend since I first took memory, and I want him to live inside me still.

I returned the piece of paper to my folder, and a woman sitting behind me yawned. 

“Are we filled?” the polio man asked. I noticed a boy sitting behind him who had been holding a piece of paper, waiting for an opportunity to be heard. He was young, and he had a beautiful face and long, curly locks of brown hair. “There is someone behind you who has something,” I said.

The boy read his poem, but I didn’t listen. I was still wrestling the bright angel that lives inside my heart.

After the boy finished his poem, the man from Olney pressed his hands together and bowed to us. I left the room without saying goodbye. I did not sleep all night. Instead, I spent the night in prison with orphans and widows, and at five o'clock in the morning I drove 500 miles home, without sleep. 

As I walked to my classroom this morning, I saw the many faces in the hallways that I see each day. I saw one of my students sitting alone in the stairwell where I see her each day as I climb to the second story classroom where I read boys and girls the old stories and teach them to write the new ones. She is trouble and doesn't pay attention, but I cannot help but to love her.

At the top of the stairs I see the empty seats where the history department has set up an informal office in the middle of the hallway. They had complained to our building principal that they were the only department without an office, so our principal, as a joke, taped off a section of the hallway outside their classrooms and placed four chairs and a coffee table inside the tiny office without walls or doorway. I thought I should write them a poem to hang on their wall. 

I unlocked my classroom door and went to my computer where I saw the card that I had left on the keyboard in order to remind myself to give it to the construction teacher who is retiring at the end of the school year. I did not buy the card for him. It was from the teacher union, of which I am president this year. He had not come to our end-of-the-year luncheon because he was busy making preparations for the high school prom, as he does every year. So I left my room with the card in my hand and delivered it to him. I shook his hand and told him thank you for his years of service.

I have given and received much since seven o'clock this morning. I hope to give more before the day's end.

The sun is still shining,
The sky is still blue,
The birds are still singing,
There is still work to do.